The aristocrat vanished after the murder of Sandra Rivett, who was found dead at his home in Belgravia, London.

His blood-soaked car was later found in Sussex.

In 1975 an inquest jury named him as the killer.

After no verified sightings of him since then he was declared legally dead in 1999.

A BBC Inside Out programme now claims to have evidence Lord Lucan was smuggled out of the UK and flown to Africa.

An unnamed woman who worked as a secretary for Lucan’s friend John Aspinall has told the BBC how she arranged flights to Africa for the peer’s children where their father could see them “from a distance”.

She said: “Instructions were to make arrangements for John Bingham, also known as Lord Lucan, to see his children and to do that I had to book his two eldest children on flights to Africa.”

Meanwhile, former police detective Bob Polkinghorne, who worked on the Lucan case in the 1980s, has told the Inside Out broadcast: “The word was he was in Africa.”

He said there was a reliable witness who was “adamant” he saw Lord Lucan in the early 1980s.

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